Tag Archives: play cd

Thankfully playing audio based .cda cds is an easy process and does not require having to rely on 3rd party controls. You can simply use the Microsoft Windows MCI Command Interface to do this. As you may be aware of you can do almost all of your Media based playback needs by using this interface including playing movie files. I do plan on making a new article on playing movie files in the future. I have a complete tutorial with some source code on how to use and program the mciSendString API so you can get a much deeper understanding on how it works and how to use it. Click on this link if you want to read it.

To get started you first need to setup the main API call that is required. Simply add the API below to your declarations section…

Now that the main API call is setup and declared you need to start using it to program the device and send it commands. The first thing you need to do is create a new device and set the device to use the CDAudio driver. As you may have guessed this driver will do AudioCD playback. Below is how to create a new device using the CDAudio driver.

Note: In this article if your using VB 5/6 you only need to change Integer or Int32 types to Long types.

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'
'This will hold the mci return value. The value in this variable will not be used in this article however.
Dim retVal As Integer
'
'This will be used to specify the drive letter of the CD or DVDRom drive to use.
Dim cdDrive As String
'
'This should be set to the CD or DVD drive your Music CD is in.
cdDrive = "D:\"
'
'Add quotes which will keep from having to get the short path since the mci device could fail if using the normal long file and path. Remember to set cdDrive to the CDRom or DVDRom optical drive. Specify like: D: or D:\ if D is your drive, or E: or E:\ and so on.
cdDrive = Chr(34) & cdDrive & Chr(34)
'
'Create a new CDAudio device with the alias CD. “CD” is how we will refer to the device in this program.
retVal = mciSendString(“open “ & cdDrive & ” type cdaudio alias cd wait shareable”, vbNullString, 0, 0)
'
'Send the command to set the time format to the device default. Set this so when asking for time/track information we can get the value as a Tracks/Minutes/Seconds/Frames format.
retVal = mciSendString(“set cd time format tmsf”, vbNullString, 0, 0)

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Now that a device has been created to use the CDAudio driver its time to start sending some commands.

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The code below will return the total number of tracks on the audio cd in the cd drive…

'
'This variable is used to receive the value when requesting information from the mci device.
Dim buf As String
'
'Give it a 128 space buffer.
buf = Space(128)
'
'This will get the total number of tracks returned from the device.
Dim trackCount As Integer
retVal = mciSendString(“status cd number of tracks”, buf, 128, 0)
'
'Get the integer value from the buffer. It will return 0 (zero) if no tracks are detected or if no audio cd is present.
trackCount = CInt(Val(buf))

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If trackCount has the number 12 then there are 12 tracks starting at Track #1 through to Track #12. So when referring to a specific track you need to specify the exact number you want the information from.

Next you can now go ahead and start Playing, Stopping, and Pausing/Resuming a Audio CD’s tracks. First you want to tell the device which track you want to play. The next set of codes will do that.

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'
'This will hold the track number to play. It is then set to track 2 below.
Dim trackToPlay As Integer
'
'Set to play Track number 2 on the compact disk.
trackToPlay = 2
'
'You need to set the time format to the cd devices default so it knows that 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on is the track number.
'Set the time format to the cd devices default Tracks, Minutes, Seconds, Frames when you are wanting to seek to a specific track.
retVal = mciSendString(“set cd time format tmsf”, vbNullString, 0, 0)
'
'This will tell the device to move to the track number specified. Simply put in the track number you want to play.
retVal = mciSendString(“seek cd to “ & trackToPlay, vbNullString, 0, 0)

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You can now start Playing, Stopping, Pausing, and whatever it is you want to do.

Thats ALL there is to it! IF the codes in this article was properly implemented then it should Start, Stop, Pause, and Resume an Audio Compact Disk (CD). There is MUCH more you can do with Audio CD’s as well like getting the length, position, fast forward, Opening/Closing the CD Door and so on. But some of those features might be implemented in a future article.

If you don’t care or have the time to create your own source code for audio CD based playback then you can check out my AudioCD based class libraries. My vbcodesource.com website has MANY libraries available that greatly simplifies the task of creating a CD player based application. I even recently released a brand new library named csAudioCD Library v2.5 Pro Enhanced for Visual Basic 2005 and VB 2008 that has Over 50 subs and properties. I have libraries for VB.NET 02/03 and VB 5.0/6.0 as well. I suggest you goto my main website under the controls and examples section if your interested. There are example applications available as well on how to use the audio cd libraries.

Anyways, I hope you got something useful from this article and it was easy to understand as well. Sometime in the future I may expand on this subject by showing how to get position, duration based information and such. Have Fun!